Like many other websites we also have many links to Amazon.com that pays us a small fee when people buy goods after clicking on the link. Although I don't know who bought what, Amazon sends me a report of which items were sold and by how much. Here are the top five items that our patrons bought in the last two months.
- Advanced Linux Programming
- Smith Wigglesworth Devotional
- Alberuni's India
- Gandhi's Autobiography
- The Timeless Theater
See Also:
• What People are Searching for via our Nosy
Surfer
Merging Content with Commerce
Integrating third party products with content-rich websites is a pain, since there is no easy way to keep the inventory, promotions, and prices in sync with the production and scheduling of content publication. Many people have implemented many solutions (remember AltaVista's much ridiculed idea?), but there really isn't a content website that has succeeded in tight integration of commerce with content.
IMO the solution lies in a combination of human intelligence and sophisticated web-services technology. Before a story goes online, the editor, a human, should perform a search of all possible products relevant to the story and build a custom promotion that is embedded in the story. However, this is a very, very expensive process without much ROI. Amazon recently gave announced a $5000 prize for tools to make this process easy.
Meanwhile, I have added a custom predicate to our Content Management System. If I write [[Amazon <ProductID>]] or [[Amazon <keywords>]], the CMS will insert appropriate links after searching the catalog for any available products. Due to the nature of our site I do not insert product pictures, prices, or reviews, but that is something plausible with the new Catalog WebService that Amazon has introduced recently.
